Is You Okay? (6 page)

One day I'll get to California,
I thought,
just not yet
.

In retrospect, I realize that being there for my dad during his health crisis, instead of pursuing my goals full-steam-ahead, contributed to that twentysomething anxiety I mentioned
earlier. I recognize that it slowed me down a little, but I'm okay with that, because I learned a valuable lesson from the one person it
didn't
slow down: my dad.

Dad didn't quit working, and he didn't use being unable to walk on two feet as an excuse for not getting things done. I've seen him strap shoes to his knees and climb up a six-foot ladder. He once picked me up off the couch from his knees and carried me when I didn't feel well. I'm a tall woman, so trust me, that's not easy.

After my accident, when people complimented me or told me how amazed they were that I was getting on planes and making TV appearances and doing collabs, I looked at my dad's example and I thought,
A broken leg is supposed to stop me from what I need to do? I still have things I want to get done. What excuse do I have not to do them? None.

My dad started with nothing, just like his seven brothers and sisters. He built a successful pharmacy business on his own and raised two successful daughters. To me, that proves that no matter what comes your way, or where you come from, you can choose to make something of yourself and for yourself, or you can choose not to. There are no excuses.

Of all the lessons my father taught me, this is the one I have carried closest to my heart as an adult. I even wrote a poem
about it and leaned on it for support when I finally moved out to Los Angeles. Lord knows, I was going to need it.

I SAID NO EXCUSES

I said no excuses!

Yes! I am talking to you,

Go on and do what you are assigned to do

Get all your equipment and don't be late,

come ready to work, get in the gate.

I said no excuses!

You know I can't hear,

My dog ate my homework,

I'll do better next year.

I said no excuses!

Use your imagination,

there's no variation on procrastination.

Never do tomorrow what you can do today,

Do your job correctly and do it right away.

I said no excuses!

It's time now to shine,

Let anything negative step behind.

Settle for nothing but the best,

You only live once so don't take less.

You have all the facts,

So it's conclusive,

I SAID NO EXCUSES!

If you've never been to Los Angeles, let me just tell you, it's a weird place—Hollyweird.

For starters, there isn't really
one
Los Angeles. There are like
seven
of them, and it's hard at first to figure out which one of them has your kind of people in it. Each one has its own character that, when combined with all the others, makes L.A. the most interesting place I've ever lived.

The easiest way to get comfortable in L.A.—or any new city for that matter—is to move there with someone you know, so you're not alone as you discover new places and learn your way around. I moved out to L.A. in 2003 with my husband Tike and our two pets—a dog and a cat. We'd been married three years when we made the jump across the country. Tike shared my dream of making it in Hollywood. I was the singer and comedian who wanted to make millions of people laugh on my own show; he was the doctor interested in acting. We were a power couple in the making, like Brangelina or Kimye without as catchy a name. GloKe? TiZell?

Because life is not a fairy tale—or anything like what you see in movies—we experienced difficulties from the very beginning.

Tike's desire to be an actor meant he had to find an acting coach, take classes, get headshots taken, go out on tons of auditions, the whole nine yards. It is not an easy path to pursue considering the amount of competition, and the fact that having talent wasn't going to be enough. Nearly every good-looking waiter, smoothie bar cashier, personal trainer, or department store clerk you run into in Los Angeles has some level of talent and is working hard to make it. Many are working one full-time job (their day job) to afford the chance at a second full-time job (their dream job). That's what it's like trying to break into acting in Los Angeles. Even if you're one in a million, in an area with thirteen million people that means there are a dozen other people just like you.

If that wasn't already hard enough, acting classes and auditions happen during the day, whereas stand-up comedy, which I was doing, happens late at night. This meant when my husband was out, I was home sleeping, and when I was out, he was home sleeping. We barely saw each other for weeks at a time, and when we did manage to share a meal together, it would almost always end in silence because I would tell him about my gigs, and he would make excuses
for all the jobs he didn't get. The pressure on our relationship began to take its toll pretty quickly.

Then things got even tougher. Barely six months after we'd made it to California, Tike's father died tragically when he rolled his car in a ditch less than a mile from his home in suburban Detroit. It was sad and unexpected and a shock to everyone, not just because all car accidents are that way but because my father-in-law was such a strong guy. He'd worked hard his whole life, yet he'd been on kidney dialysis for nearly twenty years! People like him aren't supposed to go in such random ways like that.

Tike's dad's funeral was scheduled for a Monday in Michigan—he and my mother-in-law lived there, along with most of her side of the family. Tike and I flew in over the weekend and stayed with his mother as she dealt with final details and condolence visits from neighbors and friends. The service itself was lovely. There were touching tributes, meaningful readings from the Bible, and I played the piano and sang a song.

This was a rare thing for me, and I took a lot of pride in it, because my husband's family didn't really like me. I was a musical theater major; Tike had studied science and gotten his doctorate. I was a comedy actress wannabe, he was a
doctor
. Those weren't distinctions I made—I just thought he
was a nice, caring man—but it didn't matter. His family had decided long before we got married that I wasn't good enough for him. Still, by being there all weekend and performing at the funeral it felt like I had redeemed myself (from what I wasn't sure). Either way, I was finally in their good graces.

That lasted about three hours.

When the funeral and the wake were over, we all went back to my mother-in-law's house. We were chatting and reminiscing like you do after these things when something amazing happened. Tike's mother started talking about funeral plans for her late husband, like we hadn't just attended it. She talked about what kind of music she wanted, where they should get the flowers, who should sit where in the church. It was as though the funeral hadn't happened. I dismissed it as the shock of sudden grief—she was clearly out of it, having just come from burying her husband and filling up on fried funeral food.

I found a moment when she was distracted and pulled Tike into the kitchen to ask him if his mother was okay.

“She's fine,” he said, “she's talking about the other funeral this weekend in Mississippi.”

Other funeral? MISSISSIPPI?

It turns out they were going to have a second funeral in Mississippi all along, since that's where his father grew up and was where a lot of
his
family still lived. It just so happened that my husband never bothered to tell me about it.

This was a problem.

From the minute we got the news that my father-in-law had passed away, the plan was that I was going to fly to Michigan with Tike for the funeral, perform the song they asked me to do, be there for him during his tough time, and then travel on to Florida where, the following weekend, I was booked to do a show. The venue had already sold lots of tickets,
my
family was planning to attend, and more important, I'd signed a contract. I'd given my word. Now, I'm just finding out, there would be a second funeral on the same day that I'm scheduled to perform some six hundred miles away? With all the ups and downs I'd been through at this stage of my life, it was only fitting that a dead man created the first scheduling conflict in my young career!

I didn't know what to do.

On the one hand I felt like I had fulfilled my obligation to my in-laws and I had been there for my husband like a good wife is supposed to be. It wasn't my fault that I didn't know they scheduled two funerals—and anyway,
who does that?
Who gives a loved one a proper funeral and then says, “Hey, let's
take this show on the road”? On the other hand, if it meant that much to Tike, I would cancel the show and deal with the consequences. We talked it over in my mother-in-law's kitchen and came to a decision.

I left for Florida the next morning.

The decision deeply upset my mother-in-law, but Tike promised that he would take care of the second funeral (and his mother) while I did my show. We were apart for that whole week—him with his family in Mississippi, me with mine in Florida, before we both headed back to California to pick up where we'd left off. I got back to L.A. first, and Tike arrived a couple days later, with a suitcase full of dirty laundry . . .

. . . and a handful of divorce papers.

The suitcase could have been filled with bricks and I don't think it would have hit me any harder. I mean, where'd he even get the papers? This was pre–Legal Zoom—how did he have time to find a lawyer? We'd been married three years and hadn't experienced any issues to that point, beyond not seeing each other much as we tried to make it in Hollywood, so as shocked as I was, I tried to understand. He'd just tragically lost his father and was now about to lose his wife. I thought maybe the divorce papers were just a side effect of depression. I told him I'd wait until the end of the month
before signing the papers, hoping that perhaps some sanity would find its way in.

It never did.

Within three weeks he'd paid next month's rent, moved out, and completely disengaged. This is just me speculating, but throughout that whole week when we were apart, I am pretty sure the constant drumbeat of his mother's disapproval finally wore him down. I am one hundred percent sure he let his mother believe the decision to skip the second funeral was all me, and that he had nothing to do with it. He'd made a string of excuses for his acting career from almost the very beginning, so honestly it only made sense that he make excuses for himself when it came to our relationship. His excuses cost him on both fronts: he quit on his dream, and he bailed on our marriage.

Ladies, if you get married, know who your competition is: it's not other women, it's your mother-in-law. And guess what, you won't win. If you can find a man who makes you happy, and he doesn't have a relationship with his mother, snap him up! (I'm joking, obviously, but only kind of.) To Tike's mother, there could only be one winner for his affection and it was going to be her. She was right. She was clearly the only winner in this mess.

If life wasn't a fairy tale before, well, I don't know the name for what it became. Because now I faced a type of adversity I had never experienced before.

When Dr. Palmer passed away, it changed everything for my dad. It could have thrown his entire plan into disarray if he'd let it. He could have thrown up his hands and quit. He was the opposite of Tike in that way—he made no excuses and got down to work. So that's what I would do, too.

I immediately went into survival mode. Stand-up wasn't paying anything, and California is expensive, so I had to figure out how on earth I was going to live here. I knew I wasn't going to go back to Florida with less than I came to California with—when I left, I had a husband, a dog, and a cat (which Tike took)—and I certainly couldn't go back with nothing at all.

Fortunately, I always knew deep in my heart, for as long as I could remember, that if I could just get to California, I would always be able to figure something out. I took a page right out of my dad's book: I would get two jobs to pay for my dreams. So I worked at a Sylvan learning center and an all-women's gym during the day, which paid the rent while I did stand-up at night.